Ossoff, Warnock win Georgia runoff, Democrats take Senate control

ATLANTA – Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock claimed wins in a runoff election with incumbent Republicans David

Perdue and Kelly Loeffler Wednesday, handing Democrats control of the Senate and giving President-elect Joe Biden an opportunity to improve his chances of getting his legislative agenda and nominations through Congress.

The wins give Democrats the a 50-50 tie in the Senate. With Vice President-elect Kamala Harris holding the tiebreaking vote, the twin Georgia victories deliver Senate control to the Democrats.

Both men made history: Warnock will be Georgia's first Black senator while Ossoff will be Georgia's first Jewish senator, as well as the first Jewish senator elected from any Deep South state since Reconstruction.

The results solidified Georgia's status as a battleground state, the result of rapid growth in the state's Black voter population, a shift to the Democrats among voters

of all races in Atlanta’s booming suburbs, and the massive work of grassroots mobilization groups in registering voters and encouraging them to the polls.

With Ossoff ’s lead over Perdue now at nearly 25,000 votes, AP and television networks declared the Democrat the victor late Wednesday afternoon.

Final votes were still being counted.

But Republicans were pessimistic, with most of the remaining uncounted ballots coming from the Atlanta and Savannah regions – areas where Democrats have piled up significant majorities.

At a morning news conference, Gabriel Sterling, one of Georgia’s top elections officials, had predicted Ossoff would likely win by more than 0.5%, the margin required by Georgia law to avoid a recount.

Sterling, a lifelong Republican, was clear on who he blamed for low

GOP turnout: “President Donald J. Trump.”

“When you say your vote doesn’t count … you spark a civil war within a GOP that needed to be united to get through a tough fight like this in a state that has been trending, from the point of view of Republicans, the other direction for years now,” he said.

Even before Ossoff declared victory, Republicans were already beginning to blame Trump for the party’s poor performance, saying his baseless effort to overturn his own loss in November bitterly divided the party and undercut its candidates in Georgia, who were trying to portray a continued GOP Senate majority as a firewall against Democratic power.

“The president effectively eliminated the most potent Republican argument by refusing to acknowledge he lost in November,” said Josh Holmes, a GOP strategist close to Senate Majority

Leader Mitch Mcconnell of Kentucky.

Holmes, who described the mood of the GOP now as “boiling,” said Republicans’ embrace of Trump-era conspiracy theories had especially hurt the party among suburban voters.

The level of government aid to Americans hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic was among the curveballs Trump threw at the Republican candidates in Georgia.

The president made an eleventh-hour pitch to increase to $2,000 the $600 checks to individuals that Congress was going to approve as part of COVID-19 relief legislation.

The Gop-controlled Senate rejected that idea, even though Perdue and Loeffler backed the increase.

Biden, speaking in Georgia on Monday, seized on the issue by promising to provide $2,000 if Democrats won control of the Senate.